


Coming Apart at the Seams

by brokensongbird



Series: you're the only place that feels like home [3]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Drug Abuse, Emotional Connection, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Klaus Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Vanya Hargreeves Deserves Better, Vanya Hargreeves Needs A Hug, drug overdose, klaus and vanya are twins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-19 00:14:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22035463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brokensongbird/pseuds/brokensongbird
Summary: Vanya was fine. She was normal. Vanya was fine. She was normal. Vanya was fine. She was normal.The only thing extraordinary about her was her special connection to a twin that she didn't even see anymore. She was fine. She was absolutely okay and the emptiness was not gnawing at her from the inside out and spitting her back out until she was completely consumed. She was fine.Pre Half-Doomed & Semi-Sweet
Relationships: Klaus Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves
Series: you're the only place that feels like home [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1572658
Comments: 3
Kudos: 236





	Coming Apart at the Seams

  


Vanya Hargreeves had never been considered extraordinary in her life. She was remarkable in the very fact that she was normal, growing up on the periphery of her extraordinary siblings. The only thing she could claim as a power of her own was her ability to sense her twin’s emotions but even then, that wasn’t solely hers as Klaus could feel hers too. The one time she’d tried to bring it up to Pogo, to explain that maybe she was something special after all, he had simply told her in a stern voice that that was a common phenomenon that occurred in twin siblings around the globe. What Pogo didn’t mention and very much hoped she wouldn’t remember was that she and Klaus were not truly twins, nor related at all, and their connection was very special indeed.

So, Vanya’s one power was one she shared with a few thousand people and wasn’t worth mentioning to anyone. Therefore, she continued with life in the Academy as she always had, as someone unworthy of the place she had.

Of course, she and Klaus did mention it, through their taps on their shared bedroom wall, but there was only so much that could be conveyed in Morse code and using it for lengthy conversations got very boring very quickly.

It’s not like she could have told anyone about it during the day, she didn’t see anyone apart from their silent mealtimes or to quietly preside over the stopwatch during training sessions.

Maybe, if she had been invited out on one of the many midnight excursions, she could have brought it up to her siblings, but that was a quickly abandoned pipedream. Sometimes though, after a day filled only with her own thoughts and arrhythmic violin melodies, Five would pop into her room with a flash of electric blue and a coffee flavoured donut in an outstretched hand.

After Five left, Vanya relied on her secret not-power to keep her close to her brother, to monitor him when he got too high or too scared to look out for himself. From the ages of 13 to 17, Seven had spent more time holding Four’s hand in the infirmary than she even saw the other numbers. She needed to make sure that he was there, that he hadn’t left too and so she kept an iron grip on his hand and a constant connection to his heart.

After Ben died, Vanya wanted to cut the not-power out of her chest. It’s not that she stopped loving Klaus, of course that would have been impossible, but the thought of anyone being that close to her and then leaving like Ben and Five had would have broken her irreparably. Maybe, if they weren’t connected that when he inevitably left too it wouldn’t hurt as much. Maybe if she left them all behind, they wouldn’t be too hurt by her loss.

So that’s what she did.

The night after Ben’s funeral (which she had been forced to watch, hiding behind the curtains in her bedroom window,) Vanya had packed a few clothes, taken her violin, and stolen out of the house the way her siblings had without her for years. They wouldn’t notice, she knew that. The only one left that cared about her was Klaus, and he was too hurt about loosing his best friend to notice the lack of messages from their wall.

As always with groups of children, they formed their own subgroups without prompting. One and Three were always together, sometimes including Two if he and Luther were going through a good patch. Four and Six were always in each others’ pockets, being the most sibling-like of them all. Five and Six would read together, and sometimes Seven was included if she found them before their half-hour of free time was up. Two and Four pulled pranks together, sometimes Four and Three would swap clothes and makeup if their father wasn’t paying too much attention. All of them, apart from Seven, trained together, went to the city’s parties together, snuck out together and went on missions together.

Seven had half hours of socialization every few weeks with two boys that were long gone and stilted, secret conversations. Sometimes Two would come to her room before a mission, to stutter out promises of keeping them all safe, but those turned out to be lies in the end.

They would be fine without her, even Klaus.

The pure fear she felt in the pit of her heart the next morning spoke otherwise, but he would move on. And he did, she knew two days later when the fear curdled into rage, which was probably when he realised that she left by choice. That she abandoned them.

Not that that was what she had done. They didn’t need her. If anything, she had unburdened them, freed them from the fragile living ghost that they were obligated to protect and now they could be a proper team. No one to worry about on the periphery.

Vanya wondered if they were worried. She wasn’t, not even when she had to sleep under a bridge for two weeks before she found a place willing to hire a seventeen year old with no qualifications. Of course, waitressing didn’t pay well but she found a house share and her roommates were just as apathetic about her as her old ones had been, so it wasn’t too bad.

She went to the doctors about a week into the new apartment and had been handed a pill bottle from her doctor before she had taken off her coat.

“From your father,” was all he had said. Vanya changed apartments, job, and name within the three days. She kept the prescription but said that she had moved from across the country and her records must not have transferred yet. It wasn’t long before her new housemate had told her there was a “Pogo,” on the phone that she accepted that as long as she was on the grid, she would be found. As long as he didn’t drag her back, she didn’t care. Her dosage went up, she didn’t care about much anymore.

In fact, her dosage almost doubled after her father had found her again, but she tried not to think about that. She also tried not to think about the aching centre of her chest, each emotion getting vaguer and vaguer until she could almost pass off the anger, rage, fear, and grief off as heartburn.

She had almost constant heartburn these days.

  


  


  


* * *

  


  


  


It was almost a year later.

Vanya was sitting in a hospital bed. Overdose, they’d written onto a pad by her feet. Suicide attempt by prescription drug abuse, history of depression and anxiety. It wasn’t anything special, wasn’t anything any of the nurses hadn’t seen a million times before.

Of course, the nurses were sad. They always were with teenagers, but they weren’t really too affected until Melanie on the visitor shift had told them that no one had come to see her. Not a parent, not a friend. Obviously, as she was a minor, they had to contact her guardian, but the man on the phone had paid off her bills and told the nurses to release her as soon as possible. No, he was not going to come. No, he wouldn’t pay for therapy, just to increase the dosage of the drugs his daughter had just overdosed on. When this gossip had been shared in the break room, several nurses had to be held back from calling child services, but she was almost 18 and obviously not living at home and calling them in might make the situation worse.

After that exchange, it became really sad.

So, Vanya sat alone, playing with the tag reading “Number Seven Hargreeves” on her wrist silently, thinking. Was she happy that she had failed? Objectively, yes. Yes, she was glad that she was alive and that she could make it to the spring concert at the theatre, and that she was away from her father and that she wasn’t stuck haunting her brother, another dead sibling to add to his trauma.

But at the same time the feeling of nothing hadn’t gone away. The horrible, empty nothing that had her clawing at her veins for any hope of sensation, which spun her head and twisted her thoughts and danced in the depths of her heart and demanded her life, sucking it out of her body with each exhale. That was still there. It was like she didn’t exist, like she never had and never will and all she was good for was waiting between sheets that needed to be changed 3 weeks ago for her life to start. Weak little number Seven, died from doing nothing. From waiting to be noticed. God, she would do anything not to feel that nothing. She was so alone, could a ghost be a ghost if they weren't haunting anyone? If a Vanya lived alone in the world, would she truly exist if there was no one to see her?

She would do anything to see her siblings again.

  


As if some spiteful genie had granted her her wish, a new bed was wheeled into the space on the other side of the pale blue curtain. But Vanya was hardly aware enough to notice the distinctive tattoo on the wrist, the wild hair and bold eyeliner. What she was aware of was the crackle of the nurses’ voices that branded her ears like flames, sending scorching tears down her face and throat until she choked with the pain. Now, she was feeling pain.

“ – was 30 days sober. Yeah, he took just about everything the dealer had on him, by the looks of it.” These weren’t the familiar, soft voices of the nurses that had brought her ambling back into life, but something harsh and scary and disgusted.

“Told the EMT’s his first name before he passed out. Klaus. He could be an immigrant, that’d explain the lack of records. Yeah, German or something. Bet he’s not legal either.” Both the nurses seemed to trail off after that, disappearing softly down the corridor as if they hadn’t just ripped Vanya’s world apart and left her reeling, gasping between a panic attack and no emotion at all.

It could have been two minutes later or two hours but eventually she could hear the sounds of her brother wake up over the tidal wave of her stammering heart. Her breathes managed to sync with each slow rattle of her twin’s until they were indistinguishable in the tiny room. Just as she was gathering up the courage to pull back the curtain separating them, so similar to their old bedroom wall that she almost couldn’t bear to touch it, Klaus had obviously tried to stand, fell and grabbed onto the curtain as a lifeline to slow his fall, exposing them both.

As soon as Vanya saw his face, her aching broken thing called a heart was reborn. She could feel. As soon as his wide green eyes were on hers, her veins were flooded with him, him, him. _Klaus._ She was so overcome with sensation she didn’t pay attention to exactly what emotion she was leeching from him.

“What the fuck do you want?”

Rage. The rage was back.

Vanya couldn’t reply, she had shrunk so far into herself that she was almost convinced she must have morphed into the headrest. He looked at her, with features that were so sharp she was surprised that the tattoos on his hands were still legible after running his hands tiredly down his face. He did look tired, she noticed. His entire body trembled; his eyes were black in a deeper sense than just his smeared makeup. None of that took away from the dangerous, spitting fury that emanated from his posture, no longer half fallen but towering over her in a way that was so familiar her teeth ached.

Her twin.

Who hated her.

She wanted to lie to herself and say that of course he didn’t hate her, like she just was never capable of hating them, but she could feel the tar that lingered in his mind when he saw her.

“Hey, Klaus.” She hated the way her voice quivered when his was so steady.

“Hey, dear sister of mine. How did running away work out for you? It’s been a blast for me.”

“Are you mad about that?”

“Huh- am I mad? Am I mad that my twin fucking abandoned me to our very own house of horrors? Maybe.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think you’d care.”

“Well you weren’t wrong,” he spat. _Lie,_ her chest told her. “I tore down the wall so you couldn’t really have come back even if you wanted to. My room’s bitchin now with the extra space.”

“Oh.” Their wall was gone. She didn’t have a space of her own at home anymore. That could be a good thing, reduce the temptation to go back, to run home when things got too difficult. But what it really meant was that in that time, Klaus hated her so much he’d erased the only physical connection she had to him. He’d redecorated her only space and between that and the lack of photos of her, she really didn’t exist anymore. There was no proof that little Vanya had ever existed anymore.

Maybe that was a metaphor for their relationship. Maybe that meant that whatever had broken between them couldn’t be fixed, but for some reason, from somewhere deep in her soul, Vanya still wanted to try.

“I’m sorry for leaving you. I didn’t realise what losing Ben and me would do to you; I thought that you’d all be better without me.”

Klaus didn’t react in any decipherable way to her apology, which was fair enough because as far as apologies went, that was fairly shit. He scoffed, sat back down on his bed, and kicked at the floor a little. She wasn’t forgiven, but he didn’t snipe back. So, they sat in silence. For three minutes before they both felt the silence creeping up their spines like an unwelcome jacket until it was weighing both their shoulders down and it would pull the gap between them just a little wider, tying them to their sides uselessly and they would be miles apart again.

“What you in here for?” Klaus broke it first. Vanya could read his expression well enough to know that he didn’t want to say anything at all, but the threat of the silence was too much to wallow in until they got released. She could also read his expression when he felt the stab of bone deep shame and self-loathing in his heart, from the way his thick brows crumpled inwards and his thin fingers fluttered over his chest like there was something trapped deep inside.

As for Vanya, not only her emotions were giving away what she wanted to keep secret, but her body language. She unconsciously had wrapped her arms even tighter around herself, mimicking the affection she craved, and the tears that poked at her eyelids make her skin itch.

“Oh, V –”

“I was just empty. I was so, so empty, numb, and alone. I couldn’t feel anything, it was like I was dead already. What was the point of being alive when I was nothing? I mean, no one would notice. _I_ barely would have noticed, so yeah.”

“Oh, V, Seven, I’m so sorry.” 

“What? Why would you be sorry?”

“When did this start?”

“Yesterday morning. I was fine, and then all of a sudden – “

“I died.”

“– What?!”

“I OD’d. Not on purpose! I just came out of rehab, I forgot that I had to rebuild up my tolerance or some shit and I took too much. I think I died, yesterday at 10 AM. And you felt it.”

“The twin thing,” Vanya whispered. It made sense. That nothingness was Klaus, being ripped out of her heart. “Oh God, Klaus. You were gone. You were gone and I couldn’t feel you and it felt like the whole world disintegrated.”

The last words were stuck on her tongue, but she managed to choke them out. It was something they both needed to talk about, no matter how horrifying. “I think some of me died with you,”

When Vanya looked up, making that last connection she saw how deeply affected her brother was. “I’m so, so, so sorry,” his make up had smeared, running in rivers down his pale cheeks like claw marks. He looked so pathetic, so despondent sitting there that almost constant of aura of danger that followed his around like a dark cloud had drifted away in the torrential pain and now he just was her brother again. Her twin, kind and a little jagged around the edges.

Vanya couldn’t bury herself in his arms soon enough, and as poked full of holes as they were, she couldn’t think of another time she had felt safer. Here, tucked into the arms of her twin with him pressing his face deep into the crevice of her neck and their chests pressed together, with their hearts beating the same irregular rhythm, she finally felt whole again.

“We should probably talk about the whole twin thing,” she spoke into his nicotine scented jacket, soon after the tears had dried in her hair.

“We will, but not here” Klaus huffed out a weak laugh, half-heartedly twisting a braid into her hair. “Let’s get out of this bland, unseasoned potato of a hospital and talk yeah?”

“Yeah. Lunch sound good?”

“As long as you’re buying.”

Their relationship improves, but it wasn’t fully repaired. Klaus was still bitter about her leaving, and still completely guilty about her suicide attempt and sometimes he’d just disappear for a few weeks and sometimes she couldn't believe that he was there with no ulterior motive, but they got through it. They talked at least once a month, clearing the air over and over again, as many times as they needed to. The metaphorical wall was rebuilt, brick by brick until it could stand by itself. Then, and only then, it could take the weight of their tapped messages again. This brick wall didn’t mean division, it didn’t mean separation or isolation. It meant late night I L O V E Y O Us and constant fortification.


End file.
